SOVIET HUMAN RIGHTS BATTLE: ONLY ISOLATED VOICES REMAIN

By SETH MYDANS, Special to the New York Times

Published: July 29, 1985

MOSCOW, July 28—
Naum Meiman laughs when he remembers the noisy scenes in his apartment, where groups of dissidents used to gather with Western reporters in the heyday of the human rights movement.

''There was certainly humor in it,'' he said the other day. ''Everybody with his story to be told, nobody waiting for anybody else.''

Today, a decade after the signing of the Helsinki accords that touched off that flurry of dissident activity, 18 of the 20 people who joined the Moscow Helsinki watch group have been imprisoned or sent into internal exile or have gone abroad.

Only a Few Isolated Voices

Apart from a few isolated voices, the dissident movement of the 1970's is dead, and Mr. Meiman says that after his years of activism and the imprisonment of many of his friends, the human rights situation in the Soviet Union is worse today than it was when the Helsinki pact was signed.

Mr. Meiman, a 74-year-old mathematician, is one of the two group members who are in the Soviet Union and not in prison or in exile. He, too, has given up agitating for the rights of others and appears to be preoccupied with his personal tragedy: a seemingly hopeless quest to gain medical treatment abroad for his wife, who is dying of cancer.

''After my years of working for the rights of others,'' he tells visitors, with a touch of embarrassment, ''I feel I have earned the right to plead for help for my own case.''

When Mr. Meiman remembers those days in the late 1970's, he said, his thoughts turn to the friends who are now suffering for their participation -people such as the Jewish activist Anatoly B. Shcharansky, the computer programmer Tatyana Osipova, the poet Viktor Nekipelov and the physicist Yuri F. Orlov, who founded the Helsinki group in May 1976.

All these are in prison, in labor camps, or in a harsh exile, and most are in deteriorating health, Mr. Meiman said.

''I like to believe that all we did was not in vain,'' he said. ''But of course, I feel a great heaviness and distress both for my friends personally and for society.''

On Aug. 1, 1975, the United States, the Soviet Union and 33 other nations signed the final act of the Helsinki Conference on Cooperation and Security in Europe. The document included commitments to ease cultural and informational exchanges, family reunification across borders, international travel and the like. A few months later the Moscow group was formed to monitor the Soviet Government's behavior under the provisions of the act.

Now, 10 years later, Mr. Meiman agreed, the hopes the Helsinki accords fired in the Soviet Union have died out.

''It is hard for me to say I am optimistic,'' he said. ''I have a difficult personal situation, and that always colors one's feelings.''

Mr. Meiman's concentration on his own problems is another small victory for the authorities here, who throughout the 1970's successfully deflected the energies of the Helsinki group away from broad social issues to a narrow defense of their own associates.

The Spread of Activism

The heady activism of that time spread from the Moscow group to small Helsinki watch groups in Latvia, Armenia, Georgia and the Ukraine and was reflected in groups that publicized purported abuses of psychiatry and religious oppression. But that activism appears to have been crushed with a thoroughness nobody seems to have expected at the time.

The mutual support that was growing among intellectuals agitating for democratic rights, Jews who wanted to emigrate, Russian Orthodox activists, Pentecostalists and others has again become fragmented.

Andrei D. Sakharov, the physicist and dissident who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1975, was banished to the city of Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow, in 1980. The authorities have succeeded so remarkably in cutting him off from the outside world that nobody really knows what has become of him.

The authorities have also ignored campaigns on behalf of Mr. Shcharansky, Mr. Orlov and others, proving, as Soviet Government spokesmen have insisted all along, that they will not bow to pressure on what they consider their internal affairs.

Asked why he thought the human rights movement had not rejuvenated itself, one Western diplomat said, ''Maybe repression works.''

In September 1982, as the harassment continued, the last three members of the Moscow Helsinki watch group who remained in the Soviet Union held a final news conference to say: ''The group cannot fulfill its duties and is forced, under pressure from the authorities, to discontinue its work.''

Mrs. Bonner, who is the wife of Dr. Sakharov, was convicted last August of ''anti-Soviet slander'' and sentenced to five years of confinement with her husband in Gorky.

Mrs. Kalistratova, a 78-year-old lawyer, was threatened with criminal prosecution. The prosecution was suspended because of her ill health, but it hangs over her head as a warning against further activism.

Mr. Meiman sees around him a country that seems content, even relieved, to have left behind the difficult issue of human rights. For the moment, the country seems caught up in hopes of material progress under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the new leader.

Mr. Meiman recalls the excitement of those very different days in the late 1970's when roomfuls of the nation's oppressed and unfortunate interrupted each other to read out long statements of their woes, each more horrifying than the last.

''All right, hurry up, hurry up,'' Mr. Meiman would order as some frightened Baptist or Volga German or Crimean Tatar spoke to a group of Western reporters. ''These people like to hear it short and sweet.''

Mr. Orlov was arrested in the first months of 1977, as were Mr. Shcharansky and Aleksandr I. Ginzburg. Their trials in the spring and summer of 1978 marked the climax of the crackdown on human rights in the period of detente.

After Mr. Orlov's arrest, leadership of the group was taken over by a genial, utterly bald former Red Army general, Pyotr Grigorenko, who had spent several years in psychiatric prisons after he had begun to question the system.

When General Grigorenko left the country later that year, Mr. Meiman, an ernest, didactic, somewhat absent-minded professor of mathematics, was asked to run the group.

''It was funny, me trying to tell all these people what to do,'' Mr. Meiman said, ''and I asked to step down after a year.''

Mr. Meiman said that at those news conferences, in the course of the group's six years of existence, the organization, whose official name was the Public Group to Promote the Observance of the Helsinki Agreements in the U.S.S.R., issued 195 statements on topics ranging from freedom of travel to the rights of minorities. from the abuse of psychiatry to the difficulties of retired people.

As the months passed, more and more of the statements began to center on the harassment of the Helsinki watch group members themselves.

''I realize that we represented only a thin layer of the intelligentsia,'' Mr. Meiman said. ''But I want to believe that the fact of these people existing, speaking up for human rights and risking their freedom had an effect on the minds of the people in our country.''

But, he said, ''There's no way of knowing what good we may have done.''